Meow, or: A Collection of Strange Occurrences In (or around) Drangleic
by theseeker64
Summary: Kitty was orphaned and raised herself alone in the sewers. She has a best friend named Rock who is a rock, and a penchant for smashing things she doesn't understand with her reinforced club. One day she grows lonely and sets out to catch herself a kitty. Adventure ensues.
1. Chapter 1

Kitty hated intelligence. She thought intelligence was about the dumbest thing a person could strive to increase. You'd have to be an idiot to want to be smart, and so she felt all the smart people were really idiots and all the idiots were really smart people. If it were up to her, she would have never increased her own stupid intelligence past the base level she was born with, which (though she couldn't be sure) she firmly believed was around a '2' or maybe a '3' on the 'stats of life' scale. However, Kitty needed to be a little smarter to use the stupid spell she wanted to use to capture the kitty she wanted to capture, and so she'd been begrudgingly spending the last few days reading stupid smart books and smartly avoiding stupid books, doggedly pursuing her ultimate goal of, what she could only hope, was about a '14' on the intellectual statistic of life.

Kitty also hated statistics, and really wasn't even sure what they were or why they were, but did know they most certainly and ceaselessly _were_, and so she crammed and crammed and studied and studied until she finally felt the feeling that those intangibly tangible 'statistics' governing her life's pursuits were at their requisite levels. The only way she figured she could test how smart she'd grown was was by ruminating on how stupid being smart was. After a pensive few seconds, and with a great deal of satisfaction, Kitty concluded that being smart was utterly stupid, and so she knew she'd gotten smart enough to not be stupid, and could wield her spell at last.

Three days earlier, around the time she'd started stupidly pursuing being smart, she'd found a warped and gnarled old sorcerer's staff lying forlorn in a puddle of muddy water that had formed up in the parallel rivets burrowing along the dirt road outside her house (which was really a small and unfurnished cave), and finding the staff was what had given her the idea to start spell-casting in the first place. It didn't look like a particularly good staff, and when Kitty lifted it from its muddy coffin, discovered it was in fact _two _staffs, for the haggard thing had been splintered apart right at its center. Kitty was handy, though, and never one to pass up a bit of serendipity, and so she affixed the two halves back into a whole with nothing but some string and a handful of aromatic ooze (which, despite its name, she thought smelled utterly repulsive and decidedly unaromatic).

And so it was with her old, smelly, staff and her stubbornly stupid intelligence that Kitty set out to Majula with in hopes of catching herself a kitty.

It was just after morning when she arrived, and the Big Fire Ball was sitting pretty and swollen atop the lapis sprawl of ocean that swept interminably inwards to crash against Majula's craggy cliffside. The Big Fire Ball, as Kitty thought of it, was really the Sun, but Kitty actually was, in fact, born with as low of intelligence as she believed, and so she'd never learned the mighty orb's proper name, nor cared to. Big Fire Ball was easy to remember, and it sounded like an attack she'd like to learn someday, which, in turn, filled her with a profound sense of purpose and hope every time she looked upon it and imagined herself burning whole villages of degenerate frogs or conniving seagulls or unruly piglets with such a mighty spell.

Kitty made her way through the peaceful village and towards the house with the kitty, staying close to what little shadows she could find and doing her best to keep quiet. Keeping quiet, however, was not always easy for Kitty, and—in fact—usually whenever she started talking, it wasn't long before people demanded she shut up and took to calling her a 'garrulous cretin'. Kitty didn't know what either of those words meant, but she deduced with the keen insight of one born with '2' intelligence that she probably _should _shut up whenever she started talking, or preferably even shutting up _before_ she started talking, in which there would be no chance to upset anyone enough to call her a garrulous cretin, whatever that might mean.

Particularly, Kitty had the bothersome habit of muttering '_Now I__'__ve got you!_' just after she'd sneaked up on someone and just beforeshe'd actually done the 'getting' of them. This, more often than not, prompted her would-be victims into a startled alertness that prevented her from getting them at all, and Kitty would be forced to run off back to the shadows, entirely unsatisfied and furious with her own inept ability to stay quiet. She often pondered in those fleeting moments of self-loathing contempt after a failed 'getting' if she really was nothing more than a garrulous cretin (whatever that happened to be) who couldn't shut up and would be forever doomed to not getting the people she'd almost gotten.

Kitty had fixed the problem by adding a thief's mask to her head's many decorations. It joined the suave Hunter's Hat atop her mess of auburn hair and the golden loopy earrings she'd stolen from a sleeping cleric near Heide's Tower of Flame and the monocle she'd looted from a dead man's maggot-encrusted eye that she'd cleaned up, but kept a few maggots in a satchel she wore around her waist for small and unseemly things such as maggots. She tied the mask around her face so that she could stop worrying about shutting up and start worrying about things that mattered (like capturing kitties), for the mask muffled her words into nonsense and Kitty didn't particularly miss them anyway. Whenever she started saying words, it usually meant the otherpeople around her wanted to start adding their own words to the fray, then _other _people and _other _words would join in soon enough, and the only thing she hated as much as intelligence and statistics were other people's words. Words were as stupid as smarts, and Kitty knew her life would be better off without them.

As she neared the kitty's house, Kitty reached around her satchel and fished out her Skull-Smasher. Her Skull-Smasher was a big, blunt, reinforced club that Kitty smashed skulls with when necessary, and onlywhen necessary. Kitty may have been a garrulous cretin, but she was not some barbarous beast with a brutal bloodlust for beating brains in. In fact, she didn't care for violence at all, though whenever it started up around her she really, really, enjoyed it and when it ended, often found herself eagerly awaiting the next time it would start up again.

Kitty easily wielded her Skull-Smasher in one hand, because Kitty focused her life's progression on strength. Unlike that idiotic 'intelligence' or that dreadful 'dexterity', strength was an easy to understand and easy to train life statistic, and Kitty liked it very much. She also liked the feeling of feeling strong almost as much as she liked the being of being strong, and would often show off her strength by lifting up very heavy things and mischievously placing them in places they mischievously should not be. Once, she hoisted up a cluttering of small boulders and stacked them in front of a cave opening after watching a surreptitiously spelunking sort of man go traipsing off inside. When he returned to discover the way blocked by a stupendous display of her superior strength, he pounded and shouted and pleaded with desperate urgency to be set free, and Kitty laughed and laughed until there were tears in her eyes. She ended up freeing the furious fool, but only after reminding him of how strong she was, and how a girl who could move boulders around could just as easily throw annoying cave-explorers off cliffsides.

There was also the fact that strength was fun to say aloud. Intelligence and dexterity took forever to verbalize, and were bogged down with all those little miniature pauses in between their sounds. '_In-tell-i-gence__'__. __'__Dex-ter-i-ty__'__. _The words were as annoying to say as they were to train. Strength was only one sound, no pauses, and if you said it loud enough, it even _sounded _strong.

"_STRENGTH!_" Kitty cheered, arms in the air, overtaken by a sudden surge of exuberant excitement. Of course, the thief's mask wrapping her head kept the shout somewhat quiet and turned it to "_Srmph!_" and Kitty was immediately impressed with her ingenious idea to forcibly shut herself up.

Kitty shuffled around to the side of the kitty's house. It was a small and appropriately-sized home for a petite pussy cat and was architected with the usual home accoutrements—doors and walls and roofs and what have you—but Kitty's interest was focused solely on the small and narrow window peeking in on the home's interior that Kitty immediately used to begin peeking in on the home's interior. It was dark inside, and there was little to see anyway. A shelf. A chair. A table. A shelf again. A chair again. A-

"_KITTY!_" Kitty cheered, and the thief's mask diligently did its job of quietly transmogrifying her word to: "_Krmfy!_"

Still, the kitty's ears perked up over its kitty-head and the fumbling feline fumbled right off the chair it was precariously perched atop, crashing to the floor with none of the grace of a cat and all of the grace of a mentally-unwell orangutan. Kitty dipped below the windowsill and instinctively balled up into a ball. The tactic however, while admirable, was neither smart nor affective, and so when the creature pounced to its window ledge to look outside and catch a glimpse of its potential predator, the kitty saw Kitty. Kitty, however, had her head tucked firmly between her thighs, and so saw nothing. The kitty watched Kitty for awhile, wondering why this strange young woman was doing what she was doing, and why she was wearing mismatched boots.

Kitty was wearing mismatched boots because Kitty's entire ensemble was, in fact, comprised of mismatched gear she plucked and plundered from those in varying tiers of misfortune, ranging from the very unaware and stupid to the very sick and feeble to the very dead. Kitty had no true home and no true parents and, as previously stated, was born with the incredibly unfortunate life statistic allocation of '2' intelligence, and so Kitty believed all people were born in sewers like her, and that life's true purpose was to survive and gather what you could and then survive some more and then get some more stuff and then surive at all costs. She was not entirely wrong, but such a shallow existence had caused her to be a brutish and belligerent ingrate who more-often-than-not deserved to be called a garrulous cretin when someone took to calling her a garrulous cretin.

The kitty curiously watching her from the window did not think Kitty was a garrulous cretin, but that was only because she hadn't yet had the misfortune of hearing the young woman speak. Kitty rectified that at once by hopping up to stand in her mismatched boots and staring right back at the kitty in the window, somewhat surprised at the little cat's large tenacity, but not surprised enough to prevent her from shouting: "_Majula!_"

Kitty had heard many people using the word 'Majula' and so took to saying it herself whenever she could as a sort of greeting, though it was in no way a greeting to anyone for any reason, and shouting it only ever prompted a cascade of complexity across the emergent expressions of any and all nearby listeners.

Of course, with her mask on the word sounded like "_Mrmuma!_" and, either way, the kitty she'd shouted at only adorned that invariably vexed visage that was so commonplace among the people Kitty shouted things at anyway.

"Excuse me, young lady?" The cat inquired.

Kitty's eyes blossomed to saucers. The little hairs on the back of her neck rose to attention. Her lips curled and contorted into grotesque angles around her teeth. Her toes curled in their mismatched boots. She forgot how to breath, briefly remembered, forgot again.

"…hello?" The cat questioned.

"_Mrmuma!_" Kitty mumbled into her thief's mask. Kitty also shouted 'Majula' at people when she was afraid, happy, interested, scared, or confused. She found it a very handy and multipurposeful word and like it almost as much as strength, but not as much as kitties, and _certainly _not as much as talking kitties. This occurrence of shouting 'Majula' was prompted by a mixture of both fear and excitement, for Kitty had never come across a talking kitty, and could barely contain her trepidatious elation.

Ironically, the kitty had never come across a human that talked so poorly, and so when the cat narrowed its gaze onto the young, saucer-eyed, woman outside its window, the feline growled, "What's the matter with you?"

Kitty considered it. She knew there were, in fact, plenty of things the matter with her—enough people said it on a regular basis when she came in contact with them—but could not pinpoint her problems into one, single, problem, and so simply confessed what she'd been most often told, irregardless of her lack of comprehension of what it meant.

"I'm a garrulous cretin," she explained, once with the thief's mask on, and a second time (after stomping on her own foot in frustration) with a hooked index finger tugging the mask away from her mouth long enough to allow her words to flow unrestricted to the curious kitty questioning her calamitous condition.

"A cretin?" The kitty repeated, an amused and bemused expression creeping into the creature's furry countenance. "Girl… do you know what a cretin is?"

Kitty shook her head.

"Yet you call yourself one to strangers?"

Kitty nodded.

"Hmm. Perhaps you are a cretin then," the cat admitted.

Kitty nodded.

The cat's little furry face was utterly adorable, and as the fetching feline looked her over, Kitty could not help but want to grab hold of the tiny thing and squeeze it against herself. Beneath her mask, she licked her lips and her fingers involuntarily wiggled, eager to take hold of something cute.

"Well, what do you want, girl?" The cat asked.

Kitty extended her index finger up over the rest of her gloved fingers and angled it down into the window, smushing the tip against the glass.

"Me?" The cat questioned.

Kitty nodded.

The cat chuckled in an adorably cat-like fashion. "Girl, don't be foolish. What would you want with me? I am a simple cat living a simple life. I have nothing to offer you."

Kitty prodded the glass three times in quick succession, watching her gloved finger smush and smush.

"Stop that poking at my window!" The cat demanded with sudden annoyance. "Stop that, you cretin! Stop that this instance!"

Kitty smushed and smushed, an utterly inane grin spreading across her face that was, thankfully, hidden from the world beneath her thief's mask.

"_Stop it_!" The cat roared.

Kitty stopped. Kitty considered her next action for a grand total of zero seconds. Kitty pulled her Skull-Smasher out and wrenched the big, blunt, bastard up over her shoulder, preparing to swing.

"_Oh, Gods!_" The cat wailed, hopping from the window ledge just as Kitty swung with all her might.

The window and its frame geysered inwards, filling the morning air with the delicious _SPISH _of shattering glass and the equally delightful _HRNK _of splintering wood. Kitty smiled her inane smile as she hauled up one leg and lugged it over the window frame to lay a mismatched boot down inside the kitty's home. She quickly clambered the rest of herself over so that every last bit of her was standing tall and proud in the kitty's domain, which she immediately began to think of as "Kitty's (Her's) Domain" and not the kitty's domain at all.

"_You mad little cretin!_" The cat shrieked. It had taken up a defensive position wedged in the far corner of the house. Its little kitty-fur was all puffy and static as its little kitty-face scowled adorably across the room at her. Kitty was taken again by the urge to squeeze. "_Barbaric fool!_" The cat went on. "_The front door wasn__'__t even locked! In fact__… __it__'__s not even _closed!"

Kitty looked to the end of the room. The kitty was right. The front door was hanging wide open.

All at once, Kitty was taken by such a great and profound sense of regret that lay so thickly upon her physicality, her knees buckled and she collapsed to the floor in a lump of tears and mismatched boots. She buried her face in her hands and sobbed heavily and loudly, for she had sworn never to be a mere barbarous beast with a brutal bloodlust for beating brains in who committed wanton acts of violence and cruelty unnecessarily, but instead aspired to be a kind and caring and in no way cantankerous caregiver, who was charitable and charming and could be colorfully colloquial when chatting with her collection of kitties because she wasn't crude or crass or crazy, she was _Kitty: _just Kitty! No kidding!

"Oh, stop with the melodramatics!" The kitty scolded from its safe distance across the room.

Kitty sniffled, swiped at her eyes, looked to the kitty, did her best to stop crying, and then immediately started crying again.

"Alright, sweet thing. Alright now," the kitty cooed, a sudden shift in demeanor swaying its furry little heart in a sympathetic direction. It ambled over, sinuously twisting in and out of the table legs between them, and rubbed its head on Kitty's leg when it came in head-rubbing range. "Shhh. It's alright. Nothing to cry about. It wasn't a… good window anyway."

Kitty sniffled. "Can I live here with you and be your kitty?" She asked.

"Dear, the mask," the cat informed her patiently.

Kitty punched herself in the stomach, recovered, and ripped the mask off her face to repeat herself unabated.

"Live here!?" The kitty echoed. "With… with _me_!?"

Kitty nodded. She'd always wanted very much to live with someone other than the rock she'd found when she was a small girl near the river. It was a good rock, round, hard, rocky, but it didn't say much and had no wisdom to offer her and help her overcome being a garrulous cretin, whatever that meant.

The cat looked around the small home with the freshly-smashed window. "I'm… not sure, dear. There's not much room here for another-"

"I can sleep in this!" Kitty cheered, scrambling to her feet and pouncing into a little crate nestled beneath the countertop beside the stove at the rear of the room. She fit, but just barely, and very much of her was bulging over the sides.

"There!?" The kitty questioned. "That's where the stay cats sleep when they wander in!"

Kitty said, "It's good and small and I don't take much room up anyway and even when I do its only because I'm trying to position myself to take up even less room then before and then sometimes when I don't have any room at all, I tell Rock that he has to move over, but Rock doesn't really listen or move on his own because he's a rock so I move him, but I wouldn't move you because you're not like Rock, you're more like a kitty or a cat maybe, which is sort of like me because I'm Kitty too and I think that makes us friends already just because we have the same name and when-"

The cat lifted a paw to halt her. "By the Gods girl, you _are _quite garrulous, aren't you?"

Kitty shrugged. She still wasn't sure what that meant.

"I _think _I heard that your name is 'Kitty' in there somewhere, correct?"

Kitty nodded.

"Well, hello Kitty. My name is Sweet Shalquoir." The cat bowed its furry head.

"Hello, Sweet Shalquoir. My name is Kitty." Kitty bowed her hairy head.

"I alreayd know that, dear."

"Oh, right," Kitty began with a nervous chuckle. "Sometimes I forget things like how I forgot about the spell I was going to try and use to sneak up on you and capture you because, well, that's pretty much what I do every day when I wake up and go out and go adventuring and sneak up on people and take what I need and only what I need because I'm really not some barbarous beast with a brutal bloodlust for-"

Shalquoir's paw lifted again. "Dear… could you please reaffix the mask over your face for a… little while?"

Kitty nodded, scooped up the mask, and tied it back around her face.

"Now, are you sure you want to sleep in that little old crate even when I have a human-sized bed right over here?" Shalquoir asked.

Kitty nodded.

"Are you tired?"

Kitty nodded.

Shalquoir sighed. "Well… I if it's what you desire… I suppose sleep away, dear."

Kitty closed her eyes.

Shalquoir sat pensively atop her chair a moment before asking, "Where do you hail from anyway, young thing?"

Kitty's snore filled the room.

"Impossible!" Shalquoir exclaimed, hopping down to stalk beside the crate and prod at the girl with her head. After a moment of vehement prodding with little result, Shalquoir realized with inquisitive perplexity that the girl had, in fact, fallen asleep in less than fifteen seconds! She stared at the young woman, all scrunched up in the crate in her hodgepodge of varying armors and assorted decorations and the giant, reinforced, club sheathed against her back rising and falling with the ebbs and flows of her deep-sleep breathing, and wondered just where in Drangelic the peculiar thing had hailed from… and why?

Kitty was blissfully unaware of the questions she was arousing in her new furry roommate's head. She was fast asleep and dreaming of flying through the skies with her old best friend, Rock, and her new best friend, Shaqa…laqa…shiliquarter, or whatever the cute kitty's name was.

It was a happy dream, and Kitty felt less alone then she had in a long, long, time.


	2. Chapter 2

Henry was having a spot of bad luck again. In truth, he'd been having a spot of bad luck for quite some time. His bad luck had lasted through the entire previous week, the previous year, all the years before that one, and, Henry believed, had began around the moment he was born. It was unlucky to have little luck, but it was particularly unlucky to have no luck at all, and that is just what Henry had. Despite his circumstances, he'd maintained a bright and optimistic disposition for the better half of his life, but around the time he turned thirteen years old, and all the boys at the sorcerer's school he attended took to clobbering on his face with their fists, and all the girls took to ignoring his existence (especially when he was receiving the aforementioned beatings), Henry's optimism waned away, and by the time he'd reached his twenties, happiness was nothing more than a faded memory rattling around in the back of his sulking skull, and another miserable adult had superseded the young and bright child it had once been.

Because of his perpetual position of mirthless misery, Henry often did not care where he was going or why he was going, just that he _was, _in fact,going somewhere, because going places, while not fighting off the misery entirely, certainly made him forget about it for a little while, and inversely, standing still was about the dumbest thing a man with no luck and frequent bouts of severe and crippling depression could do. Standing still, Henry thought, was only provoking the Luck Gods for a little more cruelty to be cast down upon him, and so Henry kept on the move, heading from place to place, meeting and dismissing people as quickly and casually as if they were nothing but new flavors of ice cream to be forgotten just as hastily as they'd been tested. Henry liked ice cream—one of the few things he did—and despite how utterly unfavorable his day was going, a scoop of ice cream always fanned back the flames of his despair; at least for a little while.

Due to his nomadic nature and his vigilant vagabonding, however, Henry never really knew where he was, and that condition was the source of his spot of bad luck on this day.

Henry had wandered down from the mountains with the fierce determination to not stop moving until he found a new mountain, but instead ended up finding a very large and decidedly unmountain-like valley. Henry would have turned back, in truth, upon first glimpsing such a flat stretch of nothingness, but Henry had another motto that joined in and sat beside the first of 'Always keep moving', and that was 'Never go back', and so Henry went the one way the Henry could: forward, and into the valley.

His bad luck started there, for the valley wasn't so much a valley as it was a dilapidated cesspool of poisonous pits and grotesque giants who hurled a mirthless myriad of magic at any and all unfortunate travelers, and retched little undead miners with swollen and decaying bellies and big hammers and pickaxes they drove down into the skulls of anything in range, and a skeleton horde that pooled together piles of bleached bones to form up into murderous and mad monsters with the myopic goal of cutting people to pieces if they pranced into their proximity.

Of course, Henry had bad luck, so he knew none of this as he traipsed along, eating his sandwich, and wondering if today was going to be the day, if such a day was ever going to come, when his misfortune turned to fortune, and the deep depression he'd been wallowing in finally lifted its melancholy curtains.

It was not.

Henry pulled up to a halt at the crest of a long and sloping hill that rolled down into a valley thick with puss-green gasses seeping up from some hidden channels deep in the earth. Henry examined them, as Henry was wont to do upon discovering something new and interesting, and as he carried out his meticulous scrutinization of these new surroundings, a fat and angry miner snuck up behind him with the intention of splitting his stupid scrutinizing head right down its seam.

Henry heard his attacker, but Henry (as previously stated) was not a lucky man, and thought the sound was perhaps a bird or some other gentle and furry creature scuffling about behind him. So, then, you can imagine Henry's surprise when the flat part of an axe crashed down against the back of his skull with such ferocious force, Henry's eyes rolled back into his head, and he fell unconscious at once.

Henry fell unconscious often. When he was younger, his parents had his head examined by the Sorcerer's Academy's most proficient medical staff because of how easily he was knocked into that frail state of blackout. After long hours of rigorous testing, the medical staff had deduced that they didn't like Henry, and weren't particularly interested in carrying on with the examinations any longer, so Henry never did find out what was wrong with him. Henry had that effect on people. Wherever he went, whomever he met, people just didn't seem to like him. Henry believed it was because of his bad luck, but really it was because in addition to said-bad luck, he was also terribly boring and plain-faced, and did not make a very good first impression to boot. In short: Henry was entirely unlikable.

Some time passed (some time always did when he fell unconscious) and Henry woke to the extremely unpleasant sensation of being dragged through dirt and rocks on his back. When he turned his head side-to-side and examined his situation, he discovered he was feeling that sensation of being dragged through dirt and rocks because he was, in fact, being dragged through dirt and rocks. His head thumped rhythmically against the divots and dips in the mud road he was being ushered through, and feared he might fall unconscious again if it went on much longer. He looked to his feet to see a stout, squat, barbarous-sort of fellow dragging him around by the ankles.

"Hey!" Henry shouted. "Stop dragging me around by the ankles!"

The fat man turned back, and Henry saw his eyes were quite hollow and decayed things, a putrid yellow, and his flesh was a sallow color that looked to sag and droop from his skeleton, as if it had grown bored of being worn. The fat man opened his mouth to reveal two rows of jagged, brown, mountains growing out of the pink line of his gums.

"_Oh!_" Henry exclaimed. "You are quite the hideous thing, aren't you?"

"_Baerugraahr,_" the fat fellow stated eloquently.

Henry, unsure of what the guttural growl that had been roared in reply meant, responded in his usual utterly-unlikable manner. "Unhand me you vile creature!"

The hollow blob in his worker's clothes paused and scratched at a blossoming ring of decayed flesh near his brow. "_Gaarbrrrru?_"

Henry began to suspect the thing dragging him through the mud was quite a simpleton, and if there was one thing Henry could not and would not tolerate, it was simpleton. He folded his arms across his chest and fixed his brutish kidnapper with his most scathing scowl. "Let - _go_!"

"_GOOOOO!_" The large lard howled in reply, clearly filled with rapturous exaltation over the simply word. He beat an ugly fist against his ugly chest, turned, and went on along down the path, quicker than before, and sending Henry's head smacking and bumping and beating against the trodden road more frenetically than ever.

It was very painful, and Henry wished for unconsciousness that, due to the lack of luck previously mentioned, did not come.

He was dragged in that manner for quite some time. When the dragging finally stopped, it was nearly dusk, and Henry was certain his crazed captor had caused him a good bit of terrible head trauma. Henry had little time to reflect on said-trauma, however, for as soon as the dragging ended, the hoisting began. He was lifted onto the fat man's fat shoulder, lugged up a short slight of stairs, carried beneath an arched passage that opened on a wide and dark chamber, and promptly stuffed into a very large vase.

The vase was a tight squeeze, and after Henry had been deftly deposited feet-first, his shoulders were crowded by the vase's top, his arms pinned to his side, and only his neck and head remained visible to the world beyond his vase-tomb.

Henry was not happy about this. He'd never been shoved in a vase before, and was finding the sensation quite unpleasant; though not quite as quite unpleasant as the dragging through the dirt and rocks he'd experienced previously when he'd been dragged through the dirt and rocks. He wiggled and writhed and squirmed and shook, but the vase was a tenacious thing, and the only thing he accomplished was to clatter its porcelain plinth against the tiled floor and, it appeared, further upset his atrocious abductor.

The decaying fat man grunted and picked at his big fat belly with a plump finger. He flashed the brown mountain of his teeth again and stared at Henry with a queer look in his eye and a queerer expression wrinkling the rotten lines of his haggard face.

Henry decided the man-thing was about the ugliest person he'd ever seen, and wanted desperately to escape his presence.

"You're about the ugliest person I've ever seen," Henry confessed, "and I want desperately to escape your presence."

The fat creature went on staring in its absent-minded way, picking at its belly, showing off its rotten teeth.

"Did you hear me you hideous freak!?" Henry shouted. "I do not want to be stuffed in this vase any longer! Now, if you would kindly remove me from it, I'm sure we could work out some sort of deal, and-"

His captor, with a look of complete disinterest and boredom, turned and left the chamber, and Henry felt a pang of profound sorrow stab his belly, for the act (as ugly and fat as his kidnapper was) reminded him of the pretty girls in the Sorcerer's Academy, who had so often fled his company wearing the very same bored and disinterested expressions.

"Wait, come back!" Henry wailed after the fleeing fatty, uncertain if he was calling his abductor back to be freed, or for a second chance to be liked.

But the creature did not return for a long time, and Henry was left to stew in his frustration and sorrow, trapped in his vase, and ruminating on how the Gods could have afforded an innocent and descent man like him with such piss-poor luck in the first place. He filled with a wrathful vindictiveness, renounced the Gods there and then on the spot in a dramatic shouting at the ceiling, waited a few miserable moments for his fortune to change, and when it hadn't, went crawling back to the very Gods he'd so recently forsaken to forgive him for his insolence.

For Henry was not only misfortunate and unlikable, but a coward as well.

When his captor finally returned to the chamber, the sun had just about sunk below the western horizon outside, and the room was dim, but not so dim that Henry could not realize he'd erred previously when he proclaimed the fat man was the ugliest thing alive, for _now _the fat man was truly the ugliest thing alive, shattering the previous record that he himself had so heroically held.

The creature had fixed its face up in make-up. There was a plum-shade of eyeshadow dappling the lids just below its brow, and two ruddy rings of rosy red glowing atop its cheeks, and a smear of matching red lipstick painting the thing's cracked, decaying, lips, and golden hoops piercing its ears, and a silver pearl necklace dangling from its many-chinned neck, and covering its plump bosom was a frayed and dirty white dress with a low-cut bodice and frilly trim around the arms and hem. It's brown teeth peeked out to nibble at the lower, painted, lip of its mouth, and one eyebrow (?) raised high as the creature's lids fell to an amorous half-mast and it began stalking across the room - making a direct line right for Henry.

Henry's bladder released into his breeches (he was, as previously mentioned, a coward after all), and he began frantically shaking his head as his heart hammered in his chest and a cold sweat formed up in his palms and under his arms and around his brow.

The fat, hollow, make-up-wearing, monster in the frilly dress did not heed his gestures, and came right on stalking forward, now smacking its painted lips together and filling the chamber with the sickening intermittent sound of: _sssschmack sssschmack sssschmack._

"No! No! _Nooooo_!" Henry cried, writhing from side to side in his porcelain tomb. The plinth went on smacking hollowly against the floor, but would budge no further.

The deranged demon drew closer and closer, its lips _smacking _and smacking. Henry could see flashes of rotted brown teeth every time those plump things slapped against one another, and just beside them there was a maggot drilling a hole in the monster's cheek. One of its eyes rolled around wildly in its head, the other drifted off lazily to stare at nothing. Some soft, mellifluous, humming began deep in its decaying belly and tunneled up to the thing's throat. Its fat fingers with its blackened nails started grasping and ungrasping, hungrily, greedily, _lustfully!_

Henry was so frightened, so utterly and completely paralyzed with terror, he could only stare forward, frozen in place, heart trying desperately to pound out of his chest, his head shaking involuntarily in the 'no' gesture, but his lips refusing to move in protest any longer.

The monster drew close enough for Henry to smell the stink of its foul, necrotic, breath. A plump hand reached for his cheek. A finger grazed his chin. Henry's face contorted with horrified disgust. He felt a single tear roll his cheek. The lips moved closer to his own. Closer. Closer.

_Closer._

_ CLOSER._

"_Now I__'__ve got you!_" Henry heard whispered, but it did not come from the approaching terror's mouth.

A flash of red hair moved in his periphery. His kidnapper's eyeshadowed eyes moved that way. A moment later, the biggest, bluntest, club Henry had ever seen came crashing down against the mad monster's skull, smashing it quite good, and knocking the thing flat to the ground.

A thin girl with a messy and wild tangle of red hair came leaping gracefully through the air to land atop the fallen demon and stand heroically on the mountain of its belly with her massive club held skywards with one hand, and a big, toothy, smile flashing down upon Henry.

Also, there was a fluffy cat perched casually atop her shoulder, looking just as bored and disinterested as the girls back at the academy, or the fat freak who had nearly planted a seductive smooch on Henry's helpless head only moments earlier before he'd been saved by…

"Who are you?" Henry asked his happy heroine.

"Kitty!" The girl shouted.

Henry looked to the cat atop her shoulder, nestled against her tangle of hair. "…kitty?"

The girl glanced at her kitty and giggled. "No. Shalquoir."

"What?"

"_Shalquoir,_" the kitty said. She nodded to the girl. "Kitty."

"_AH!_" Henry wailed. He'd never met a talking cat, and the sudden feminine voice seeping from the feline's furry face was about as startling a thing as Henry had ever witnessed.

"_Demon!_" He cried.

The kitty frowned. "Shalquoir."

"Kitty," the girl said, angling a thumb at her chest and broadening her smile.

Henry was feeling awfully confused again. "What?"

"Kitty," the kitty said nodding to the girl. "And Shalquoir."

"Demon!"

"No! _Shalquoir_!"

"And Kitty!"

"What?"

"Kitty!"

"Who _are _you two!?"

"Kitty and Shalquoir, you fool, now stop your blabbering!" The kitty said.

Henry still deeply feared the talking cat, and so could only once again helplessly shout, "_Demon!_"

The red-haired girl's smile faded, and a frown darkened her expression at once. She stepped off the swollen belly of her defeated foe, walked right up to Henry's vase, and tapped him atop his head with her big blunt club.

Henry was always slipping in and out of unconsciousness, at Henry was wont to do, and the girl's gentle tap sent him to the gentle embrace of the darkness the moment it grazed his sweat-streaked brow, and Henry went with a smile: for in that darkness, there was no one who disliked Henry, and he didn't need worry about bad luck, for bad luck didn't exist: only a pleasant, numb, stretch of missing time, which Henry heartily welcomed the moment it came.


End file.
